Live Stream Church Services and Events During Covid-19

 

My wife, Kate Bowler, and I have been adapting to the COVID-19 protocols like everyone else, and being part of the Christian community as well as a web developer got me thinking that church congregations may be able to benefit greatly from a little assistance going online with interactive live streaming of Sunday services.

 

Even Wednesday evening gatherings, child care, or other community events may be transferable to the home environment.

 

We’ve been experimenting with a few apps and products that provide an all-encompassing ecosystem including:

  • Scheduled live streams for services and other events
  • Live group prayers in the live stream chats
  • Bible verse notation along side the live stream
  • Repeatable and/or one-off service scheduling
  • Donation links, and other layout and navigation customizations
  • Custom branding in the application interface
  • A Content Management System (CMS) for managing and curating the congregation and services

 

If your church needs to maintain or increase online giving and online tithing, we can help. If your church needs help maintaining an intimate, familiar, and interactive community, we can help. Contact me at toban@pennerwebdesign.com and we can walk through the process.

 

Providing this quality of support for a congregation could be a game changer for affected families, and a meaningful way for churches to maintain operations during such a tumultuous period.

 

I hope you’re well, and taking care of your loved ones,

Toban

toban@pennerwebdesign.com

Basic SEO guide for creating posts for your blog

Here is a very basic SEO guide for beginners who want to use their blog to improve their search engine ranking.  In it, I assume you’re using the plugin “All in One SEO”.

1. Choose a keyword that people would search for (you can do multiple keywords if it makes sense).  If you want some help or recommendations, Google’s Keyword Planner might be of some help to you: https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner

2. Use said keyword in the title of the page once.

3. Use the keyword in the body of the page at least once, but not more than three times

4. If you have any images in the post, set the alt tag of the image to the keyword.  You can click on the image to edit it.  Then look for “Alternative Text” and put your keyword in there.

5. Scroll to the bottom of the page under “All in One SEO Pack” and fill out the Title, Description and Keywords using your keyword in each of them.  The title is the link that shows when people find your page with google.  The description is the short paragraph under the link, and the keywords just tell google what you’d like to rank for.  Do not put any keywords in that are not in the body of the article. 

Screen Shot 2014-07-28 at 11.55.00 AM

Screen Shot 2014-07-28 at 11.55.51 AM6. Select the appropriate category for your post (look on the right side of the page).  If there is no appropriate category, create a new one right there on the page preferably using your keyword.

7. Add your keyword as a “tag” (again, look on the right side).

Durham Web Design, I am owning you

My work on getting ranked for Durham Web Design is going splendidly. I’m #1 for Durham web design on Bing, #3 on Yahoo, and I’m at the top of page 3 on Google. That’s a pretty big leap in 3 weeks. I started out on page 18 of Google three weeks ago. So I’m pretty excited about this. I’ve changed a lot of the structure of my site and placed key words in strategic places. I’ve worked on my incoming links and removed all errors from my code and optimized it for all the search engines. I’ve done xml sitemaps, registered with all the search engines, registered for maps and local searches and done a million other things. It’s all paying off, literally (I got a phone call today with a new customer in Raleigh, NC).

Need to rank for a keyword? I suppose now, I can tell people I really know what I’m doing. Do a search for “Durham Web Design”, and see where I come. Then do a search for what your customers are searching for, and see where you come up. If you’re not happy with that result, give me a call and I’ll help you out.

SEO work is paying off

I’ve spent the last week or so optimizing my site for the key phrase Durham Web Design. I’ve had some good success on Yahoo, and Bing, and now Google is starting to come around. I went from the bottom of page 18 last week to the top of page 14 this week. Update: as of Sunday morning, I’m at the top of page 9. Google apparently takes 3-6 months to fully “catch up”. But I’m making good progress.

My other key word is WordPress. And now I rank #1 in Google for Durham WordPress design, Durham WordPress help, and Durham WordPress customization. I’m pretty pumped about this. Call me if you need help with your SEO

So far, I’ve been concentrating on doing a lot of rewording of my site and link building. My competition has literally thousands of links coming into their sites. Ya, so pretty tough to compete with that. I’m still showing around 88 links from 8 root domains, which I know is incorrect, but that will come around in the long term. Not sure how long that takes, but it’s an important measurement in determining your Google Rank. One important thing that I’ve changed is my anchor text. I’ve been including the words Durham web design and WordPress in as many of my incoming links as I can. That way, the search engines will associate these terms with my site.

SEO page one quest… update. Penner Web Design: 1, Yahoo: 0

Yup… it took me 5 days, and I’m on page one of Yahoo for the search term “Durham Web Design”. At the very bottom of page one, but I’m there none-the-less. This all happened while I was trying to optimized for Google… not Yahoo! The point is, when you do SEO the right way, all the search engines will find you. Google will take much Read more SEO page one quest… update. Penner Web Design: 1, Yahoo: 0